The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

I can’t recall when I first read about the Mitfords. (Evelyn Waugh? In the Garden of Beasts?) And although their name was highly familiar, and some aspects of their story somewhat familiar (one of them was a Hitler groupie, if not quite his girlfriend), I couldn’t have accurately stated so much as their names or that there were, in fact, six of them. I did have a sense that the sisters were famous for being famous, and when I laid eyes on the lengthy tome at the library for the first time, I had second thoughts. I can only say that I am very happy that I shushed them and read The Sisters.

As the title suggests, The Sisters is a biography of the six Mitford sisters (Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah) whose politics, antics, and scandalous behavior rendered them household names in 1930s Britain. There was Diana, who married one of the richest men in Britain, the heir to the Guinness fortune, only to run off with Sir Oswald Mosley (yes, the fascist) when her children were toddlers. Unity was the Hitler groupie who had so convinced herself of the impossibility of war that she simply shot herself at the outbreak, while Jessica ran off to Spain with a black-sheep cousin in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. Nancy and Jessica would late become bestselling authors; Deborah became a Duchess who, together with her husband, restored one of England’s most important country houses. (It's no wonder that The Washington Post wrote in Deborah’s obituary – she died in 2014 at 94 – that the Mitfords’ real life squabbles and drama made Downton Abbey look “uneventful.”)

Although in some ways, this is just another romp through the bad behavior of the English Upper Class (see Daughter of Empire or White Mischief for other examples of this genre), Mary Lovell has crafted this biography so that the British Empire, first strong and then rather crumbling, shines through. In that way, this is a book about Old England and England-in-Transition as much as about the Mitford family. The trauma of the King’s abdication is there, as well as the pain and confusion of the years immediately after World War I and then again during the Blitz. For these reasons alone, The Sisters is worth reading, and anyone with an interest in British history will surely enjoy it.